Kiss and tell and index

Abstract

In Alain de Botton’s novel, Kiss and tell (published by Macmillan,1995), the hero/narrator, dismissed by his latest girlfriend as totally self-absorbed, determines to prove his possession of the quality of empathy by writing a biography, seeing the biographer’s mission as ‘understanding a human being as fully as one person could hope to understand another, submerging myself in a life other than my own’. For his subject he will select someone quite ordinary, to demonstrate ‘the extraordinariness of any life’. So Kiss and tell details the life of the fictitious Isabel Rogers, ‘the next person to walk into [his] life’, presented in proper biographical format. The 12 chapters begin with ‘The early years’, ‘The early dates’, ‘Family trees’; the volume comes complete with preface and index, and two sections of photographs of Isabel, her family and friends, all appearing entirely authentic. A reviewer wrote of de Botton’s previous works, Essays in love and The romantic movement: ‘his books are original hybrids, part novel, part philosophical reverie’. This hybrid novel/biography/biographical critique comprises three strands. It is at once the (pseudo-)biography of Isabel; an account of the narrator’s developing relationship with her (‘one may suggest a connection between attachment and the biographical impulse ... a true biography demands a more or less conscious emotional relationship between author and subject’); and much consideration of the nature of biography itself. The tenor of this can well be assessed by quoting the subheadings under BIOGRAPHY in the index: